We know that many of you are into tech workshops and conferences. Especially if it’s about HTML5, mobile and creating great user app experiences.
If you fall into this category, we have something to give away!

The folks from Apps World have reached out to us and offered couple of gold (full access) passes as a giveaway to HTMLCenter readers.

Apps World is returning to London for the fifth year running and has grown to be the leading global multi-platform event in the app industry.

These days creating a new piece of web or mobile software feels a lot like combining already made pieces together. Adding some glue so they do not fall apart, releasing version v1 and repeat the loop many times. Until you are satisfied that nobody cares or that you have actually built something useful.

Agile, lean and other tech product methodologies have thought us to use this process. And ever increasing modular nature of web and back end frameworks make it easy to follow these steps. Many hours are already spent by community of smart people while creating all the reusable modules for your future app.

Good example to illustrate this trend is Hackathon Starter project. Its created for people building web and mobile apps with help of Node.js. As the name suggests it was created as reusable prototype for hackathon projects. In hackathons you usually have ~24 hours to create a somewhat working project. As this template is beefed up with main modules it will save lots of time and will let you concentrate on the specific functionality you want to achieve.

I have recently found a great online gallery of HTML5 web app designs. It has 19 (at the time of this post writing) well designed and free to use web app templates.

They are all responsive, look beautiful on desktop and mobile browsers and do support multiple screen resolutions.

What I most like about this web gallery is that the author has started in 2012 and has grown a lot with every new design he posted! He has also created a www front end framework skelJS which is the powering engine for all these HTML5 designs.

The most recent templates are really worth taking a look at and will for sure give you some inspirations on how to use HTML5 in web projects.

These days many developers are exploring ways to speed up and to simplify mobile application development process. And I see more an more tools created for this reason.

Today I noticed one such tool which takes slightly different approach. It allows you to build mobile applications by using WordPress CMS. Its called Apppreser.
They help you to convert WordPress based HTML sites to a native mobile applications by wrapping them to PhoneGap framework.

The idea is to use WordPress plugins to talk to PhoneGap APIs and this way connect to mobile hardware.

Even if folks from Apppress are charging quite a few bucks for their plugins and implementation the use case is promising. There are plenty of websites powered by WordPress and theoretically it should be possible to make HTML5 mobile applications from them with a little bit of effort.

As for the high price for the service, I’m sure there will soon be open source versions of such plugins available. WordPress developer community is known for creating great open source plugins.

Applications we build are more and more dependent on 3rd party data sources. And as Internet of things continues to grow, this fact becomes even more stronger.

It allows us to create great experiences for the app end users by presenting them data gathered from across the Internets. But at the same time we have to spend more time ensuring that our applications are consuming all this data securely and they only get access to the data they need. OAuth protocol was designed and developed for this exact reason.

This is the second part of tutorial for building native mobile application based on AngularJS, HTML5 markup and CSS styles. In the first part you will find how to setup the new project, add routes, controllers, HTML5 views and do simple testing in a standard web browser.

What we are doing in this tutorial?

In this tutorial part we are going to take previously created application and add back navigation button, sliding animations between the views and functionality to retrieve data from web services by using asynchronous HTTP communication. Finally I’ll give some hints how to wrap this application into PhoneGap framework in order to create installable version. Lets get started.